Nigerian off-grid energy startup Okra Solar has secured a US$7 million debt facility from British International Investment (BII) to accelerate clean energy access.
Founded in 2016, Okra provides mesh-grid technology for off-grid communities, combining solar generation, battery storage and smart controls so that neighbouring homes and businesses can share electricity cost-efficiently. The model delivers more power than typical solar home systems while needing less infrastructure than conventional mini-grids.
Okra currently has more than 13,000 households connected and over 2.3MW of installed capacity. The US$7 million financing from BII, the UK’s development finance institution and impact investor, will allow it to procure equipment for roughly 150,000 new connections, a more than tenfold increase, with the potential to bring electricity to 750,000 people in rural Nigeria for the first time.
The facility tackles a key barrier to scaling distributed renewable energy – access to flexible working capital. By buying inputs upfront and in larger volumes, Okra expects to cut equipment costs and shorten delivery times to Nigeria from four months to about two.
“Every month a project is delayed is another month a community goes without power,” said Afnan Hannan, CEO of Okra Solar. “Until now we would only order components once a transaction had closed, in batches of a few thousand units. With BII’s facility we are procuring long lead time components, batteries, and solar PV equipment upfront and in volume, reducing costs and having stock ready when a developer signs.”
Faster delivery should also help Okra’s developer customers bring projects online sooner and access results-based grant payments earlier. Mesh-grids are eligible under Nigeria’s Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-up (DARES) programme, which is run by the Rural Electrification Agency with World Bank support.
“For innovative energy companies such as Okra, access to the right type of finance can be just as important as the technology itself,” said Geoffrey Manley, director and head of infrastructure and climate debt for Africa and South Asia at BII. “We believe this will help demonstrate the commercial viability of mesh-grids and establish the model as an increasingly important part of Africa’s distributed renewable energy market.”